May 12, 2009, - 12:17 pm
The “End” of Westerns: Did Americans Really Lose a Sense of “Manifest Destiny”?
By Debbie Schlussel
Although there have been some good westerns in recent years–my fave is the remake of “3:10 to Yuma” (read my review)–they are sparse and few.
And that’s sad. Even more disturbing, though, is one commentator’s belief as to why this is, which I was disappointed to read in this weekend’s “USA Weekend” celebrity gossip column:
Will actors Sam Elliot, Tom Selleck or Bruce Boxleitner, who have played memorable cowboys, star in a new TV western? No one makes them anymore.
Roy McCallen, Aurora, Colo.
Gary Edgerton, author of a new history of American TV, says westerns are on the wane because we’re “less enamored with a sense of manifest destiny and nation-building than 50 years ago.” Creators of new TV westerns need to freshen up the formula, Edgerton says. As for the actors you mention, none of them has a western in the works.
Well, I’m all against “nation-building”–which is something we did and had no business doing in Iraq and something which the Nation-Builder-in-Chief, Bush, campaigned against. (Now we’ve built a “nation,” indeed–a greater Iranian Shi’ite nation.) But there is nothing wrong with the best era of American’s boldness–our manifest destiny, with the great old west and discovering, conquering, and settling new lands in the west and the south.
I don’t agree with Edgerton that “we’re” less enamored with that era. Hollywood is. And that’s because that’s an era of American pride, where Americans worked hard, sold hard (there’s a great tradition of Jewish traders and salesman out west, including the ancestors of late Senator Barry Goldwater), and succeeded. Hollywood doesn’t like to remember times when America was great, and when they do, we’re usually portrayed as rapers and murderers of Indians. So, maybe it’s best, they no longer make those films.
Still, it’s sad that there are less Westerns. They can be fun, exciting movies. And I wish we had more, instead of the giant heap of crap Hollywood has been serving up lately.
So, what is your take? Why have Westerns “gone out of style”? Why aren’t they making them? Have Americans really lost interest in them? Are they too slow for the IPod, Playstation, Wii, post-post-MTV generation?
Why no more Westerns? Here are a few reasons…
1. No opportunity for special effects or CGI, as the very nature of the stories calls for “practical” action.
2. All Westerns are based on some moral dilemma, but since there is no morality anymore (at least in Hollywood), they cannot create these stories.
3. All Westerns need a good guy and bad guy, and even though this supposedly still exists in such current fluff as Star Trek, the baddies now are just excuses to blow things up.
4. The last hurrah of the Western (except for blips like Silverado) was during the 60s, and even then it was more because of the interest of “end of an era,” which writers at the time were likening to the changes of the 60s. Thus you had such films as The Professionals, in which the values were pretty skewed for a Western–but as stupid as its story was, it was reasonably popular at the time.
Red Ryder on May 12, 2009 at 1:36 pm